An Everyman in Search of the Extraordinary (That Is to Say, the Everyday)

''Well, hello, everybody!'' the tall, tan man in shorts, sandals and tropical shirt says to the lone camera facing him in the soft California twilight. ''I'm Huell Howser, and here we are on this beautiful evening, standing right in the middle of beautiful downtown Garden Grove!''

And so begins another 28-minute segment in the life's work of Mr. Howser, the most popular public television personality in California, who is the host of ''California's Gold,'' a folksy weekly show that chronicles the highways and byways of the Golden State and is now in its 13th year as the only local program to be carried on all 13 public television stations statewide.

On this night Mr. Howser is taping another series, called simply ''Visiting,'' which runs nightly in Southern California, and his quarry is nothing more elusive than the weekly Friday night vintage-auto show in the center of this Orange County suburb. He stops for a milkshake at Kay's Kitchen and a chat in Zlaket's family-owned meat market, and takes his hand-held wireless microphone to talk to a handful of owners about their cars, and their lives. An edit or two to bridge the gaps between indoor and outdoor shots, and that's it.

''I'm just a guy, wandering around, discovering the joys of living in California,'' Mr. Howser explains.

In the most jaded media markets on earth, where the staples of nightly news are live car chases and celebrity arrests, Mr. Howser, a country lawyer's son from Tennessee who has never tried to lose his twang, serves up not just offbeat slices of local life but whole, half-hour loaves, in a low-tech, low-key, low-voltage style of reality programming that has nothing in common with ''Survivor'' or ''Temptation Island'' or most of the rest of 21st-century television.

On a recent visit to Barron's, a venerable pancake house in Burbank, a diner told Mr. Howser that the members of the restaurant's staff were ''the sweetest people, they treat you like a queen,'' and he bore in with a typical Howser hardball: ''Now, when you say they're the sweetest people, what do you mean?''

Mike Wallace he's not. But whether he is following Julie Nixon Eisenhower up the stairs to her father's tiny boyhood bedroom in Yorba Linda, or listening to Lee Iacocca expound on the wonders of electric vehicles in Palm Desert, or just visiting with Esther DeBar, an 88-year-old white homeowner who proudly stayed put with her backyard persimmon tree in South Central Los Angeles after all her white neighbors made way for new black ones, Mr. Howser brings a touch of Thornton Wilder to his open-eyed explorations of everyday life.

He has done specials with only a small camera he holds himself, interviewing poor people in the middle of the night in Los Angeles or people on the streets of Cuba and the former Soviet Union. His station, KCET in Los Angeles, gives him extraordinary license, and his programs go direct from his editing bay onto the air. Here in Garden Grove, he is swarmed by adoring fans.

''When you go with Huell around California, people just descend on him,'' said Kevin Starr, the state librarian, who is the author of a sheaf of books on California's cultural history. ''They hold him, they touch him, they shake his hand. It is almost as if he's a ministerial or rabbinical figure. He communicates enthusiasm and acceptance and the dignity of ordinary people. He's after stories about ordinary people, and he's devoid of irony.''

Howard Rosenberg, the television critic of The Los Angeles Times, said: ''He's an anomaly in this black hole of media. He has a genuine knowledge of and affection for Los Angeles and California, and he is the one place you can really go, I think, to find out about the city and the state. He goes to the places that no one else even bothers with. To me, it's just amazing.''

Mr. Howser, fit and trim at 55 like the former marine he is, may sound like a Beverly Hillbilly, but he long ago took to urbane living. He divides his time between a sleek apartment (it once belonged to the actor William Frawley, best known as Fred Mertz on ''I Love Lucy'') in a vintage Hollywood building and a house in Palm Springs, and he lives surrounded by an eclectic collection of found objects -- scraps of metal, chunks of glass -- that have been turned into furniture and light-up sculptures.

A history graduate of the University of Tennessee who started his career as an aide to a Republican senator from his state, Howard H. Baker Jr., Mr. Howser operates on the simple premise ''that TV ain't brain surgery.''

''I attribute any success I may have in television,'' he said in one of a series of recent interviews, ''to the fact that I never took any courses in it.

''Because I never learned how I was supposed to talk, how I was supposed to walk, how I was supposed to act in front of a camera. So in today's television world, where everything is so highly and, I think, over-produced, here's a program where literally what you see is exactly what happened.''

If Mr. Howser interviews a celebrity, it is usually by accident. (He once did a six-minute segment on the actor Dennis Franz, a fan, but only because he was doing a show about the job of the set decorator who makes ''NYPD Blue'' look authentic.) He uses only a hand-held microphone, because any other kind of sound system would require knowing in advance whom he planned to interview, and he never does. He seldom does much advance research. He showed up in Garden Grove on less than a week's notice, after bumping into a local resident, Harvey Reyes, in Palm Springs and hearing about the weekly auto show on a revived stretch of Main Street.

Mr. Howser grew up in Gallatin, Tenn., 30 miles from Nashville. He spent most of the 1970's as the feature reporter for WSM-TV, the NBC affiliate in Nashville. Then one day he did a segment about the proposed demolition of the old Tennessee governor's mansion to make way for a Popeye's chicken franchise, and compared America's treatment of its old buildings to its treatment of old people.

The station suspended him for 30 days for editorializing. Officials at WCBS-TV in New York heard about the episode and hired him in 1979 to do a weekly magazine show, but it proved a poor fit: When station executives previewed his first show, about homeless people living beneath Grand Central Terminal, they were, as he recalls it, aghast. He had put his hand on the people's shoulders, and, he says, the station officials told him New Yorkers would never touch a person living in the street.

He then found a happier home as a feature reporter at KCBS, the CBS station in Los Angeles, until, frustrated at doing two-minute features, he left for KCET in 1987. Not long after he got there, he came up with the idea for ''California's Gold,'' found a corporate sponsor and took two weeks' vacation to drive to all the public television stations in the state to persuade them to carry it.

''There's no reason why California shouldn't have this flag-waving, breast-beating sense of place,'' he said, ''of who we are and what we're all about.''

Correction: August 17, 2001, Friday A profile on Tuesday about Huell Howser, a public television personality who chronicles life in California, misidentified the town where he interviewed Lee Iacocca, the former Chrysler chairman, about electric vehicles. It was Desert Hot Springs, Calif., not Palm Desert.